i'm currently holed up in my room with a black pigeon. i have no idea what to do with it. i had the misfortune of running into it in the elevator. it had somehow found itself stuck in the suffocating little box that opened its doors to different places without really seeming to move, letting in and letting out strange wingless giants with flat, featherless faces. it had a mortified look plastered to its face when i found it, a look it's still giving me now crouched in a little cubby under the writing desk across from the bed where i'm typing this. (edit that: it seems to have fallen asleep now, head tucked under its wing, the dish of mooncake crumbs i'd given it as yet untouched. i hope when the ants come, it'll realize the crumbs are edible, and take a bit of it before the ants can rob him of sustenance, or, worse, overwhelm him. i'd hate to wake up tomorrow with a bird corpse covered in ants.)
at first i urged it out of the elevator when it reached my floor, but then i thought 'what would a pigeon do with itself up here?', and urged it back into the elevator and accompanied it to ground level. once there, i followed it out to see what it would do. i couldn't just leave it, could i? (of course i could, but if you know me, well, i wouldn't. not when i have nothing better to do, and no one around to watch me being silly over a strange bird.)
it waddled about in the enclosed atrium thing on the ground floor for a bit. old people use the space to get some fresh air at unexpected hours of the day. luckily, the old people who'd been sitting on the benches there had only been waiting for the elevator, and they got on it right after we'd gotten off. i'd hate to have had someone watching me try to figure out what to do with a silly little pigeon that won't fly away.
and it wouldn't fly; it just kept waddling slowly about like an old man with a fractured hip, or a little skeksis. yes, almost exactly like a little skeksis, only--as far as i can tell--without the pure wickedness. i followed it around some more. i tried to pick it up when i realized it wasn't going anywhere. (there were cats about and i thought it should find someplace else to be. i like them well enough, the cats, but they aren't really friendly, least of all to a hapless pigeon, as you might imagine.) the first time i tried, it spread its wings and finally fluttered away from me. it made it up about a foot off the ground...not quite high enough to keep it from bashing into the low ledge fencing in the atrium. almost, but not quite.
eventually i managed to pick it up; once you got your hands on it, it couldn't put up much of a fight. now i had a bird in hand with no idea what to do with it. a bird in hand is much overrated, times like this. i could have hoped for two in the bush to take this one off my hands, but there were cats, not birds, in the bushes, what few bushes there were, at any rate, and anyway, it's night time. the other birds have no doubt gone to bed by now.
i decided we should try a test flight. maybe all it needed was a jump start to really get off the ground; if it could fly far enough from me, what happened after that would be none of my business.
i walked out of the atrium with it cradled in both hands, into the football field out back. i counted to three, then tossed it into the air like i'd seen them do at magic shows, or on TV when they were making John Woo films and the pigeons wouldn't cooperate.
this time, with the additional altitude at take-off, it made it out a few meters further than it had in the atrium, before setting down in the grass. at least it had no low wall to bash into. i walked over to where it had landed and sat down beside it. 'you're not getting anywhere on your own steam, are you?,' i said to it, or something like that. 'what am i supposed to do with you now?' it just looked at me like i was crazy for trying to talk sensibly to a pigeon.
anyway, it seemed too exhausted to even try to respond, much less waddle away when i picked it up again. i didn't even need both hands.
so now it's up here, in my room, with its head tucked under a wing, while me, i type up this blog post and hope my landlord doesn't find out i've got a guest. (i'm not allowed guests. much less if they happen to be pigeons, i imagine, what with the baby and all.)
i can only hope all it needs is food, maybe some sleep, the latter of which it's finally getting a bit of. at least it's relaxed now, the mortified look (mostly) gone from its face. who knows what it might be dreaming.
i'll figure out what to do with the little chamberlain--as i've decided to call it, what with the skeksis reference--in the morning.
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